The Drake show last night was a lot of fun; packed house, great crowd. Thanks to everyone for coming out and thanks to the Drake and Newelectronic Productions for hosting me. Above is the only shot I have at the moment, it’s from Sgraffio*’s Flickr. There were a couple photographers there last night, I will post their shots once I get them back.

Alex Harrison was also kind enough to bring his crew and film the whole thing so a live video from the night will be coming out in the near future.

Just a quick reminder: I’ll be playing live @ the Drake in Toronto tonight. Full live visuals on multiple screens. We’ll be taping this for the next album supplement so should be a good one. It’s an early show; I’ll be going on around 10pm.

Leaving early a.m. this morning so spent the night getting prepped and packed for Toronto. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be speaking at FITC and playing a couplelive shows. For the live stuff I’ll be doing an all new visuals set using a new piece of software I’ve completely fallen in love with. It’s the most enjoyable app I’ve come across, maybe ever. It’s a modular video app called VDMX and it blows the doors off anything I’ve ever used for the purposes of live video. You can essentially design the way it works to your liking, you design the interface and the functionality. There’s a bit of a learning curve but once you get over that you start to realize how powerful it can be. At $300 it’s not super cheap, but considering the feature set and functionality it’s well worth it. It can do quartz composer effects and blending modes all in real-time.

I am using a Novation Remote SL and footpedals to control most of the parameters of the video portion, and a the same Novation with split parameters to control another laptop running Ableton Live. I’m also routing a set of audio outputs from Live to VDMX which then analyzes the incoming sound and modulates various parameters based on the amplitude of selected frequency ranges. Somehow VDMX is able to do this all in real time, I’m still not quite sure how.

There’s a show Saturday and Sunday night, I’m hoping to video tape the show on Sunday night at the Drake but it remains to be seen if we can track down someone to tape it on short notice. If you or anyone you know has proper video equipment and some skills to go along with it, let me know.

Joe Rossell sent in these great shots from the Yuri’s Night show on Saturday. He used a Canon 40D and from what I’ve read, it’s a comparable model to the legendary 5D but at half the price (there’s a good discussion of this issue at the Flickr 400D group). I want to ditch my Nikon D80 sooooo bad, I really loathe that thing. Seeing filmic results like this from the 40D just makes the decision so much easier. But I feel like I should hold off since there’s been talk of the 5D’s successor being release very soon, supposedly early 2008.

The show itself was a pretty interesting event. I played in the day time but the whole thing went on until 2am (here’s a shot of the same stage later in the night, a bit different vibe). The day set was great though, a very mellow vibe and a totally great crowd. And besides all that, how often do you get to play on a billion watt sound system inside of a NASA research hangar? The only issue I had with it was the DJ format. I don’t really like when they hide you way up there behind all these counters and gear, it sort of takes away the intimacy of the show. But then again, it was an airplane hangar, so how intimate was it really going to get. I also couldn’t do visuals since it was still daylight, but not much you can do about that.

And by the way, the observant might notice the 1976 variant I’m wearing. It’s brand new and will be available at the shop in the next couple hours. I’ll be doing a proper release and newsletter tonight, but consider this an early warning.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the show tonight, it was a great time. For those of you who missed it, Yuri’s Night 2008 SF was today. It’s an annual festival celebrating the anniversary of the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin). The event is held at NASA Ames Research Center which is this huge complex of hangars and test facilities. Along with the music there are exhibits for all things science related: Robotics, Aeronautics, sustainable energy etc. Really an interesting event with a lot of interesting people.

Incidentally, I didn’t take the above photo, nor is it even of this year. It’s a shot from last year and the event has apparently grown quite a bit. I unfortunately neglected to bring my camera so all I have are some lousy iphone shots.

I’ll be speaking at the FITC Toronto Design & Technology Festival on Monday, April 21st, 2008 [view full schedule]. I’ve yet to attend an FITC event but I’ve heard great things so I’m very excited to check it out. I’ll be covering the method and theory behind my work in a talk entitled "ISO50: Blending Analogue & Digital". Hope to see you all out.

I’ll also be doing a live Tycho set with ISO50 visuals at the Drake Hotel in Toronto on April 20th. I’ll be posting more on that as details become available. There’s talk of a set during the FITC festival as well, more info will follow.